Wednesday, January 27, 2016

Installing Android-x86 4.4 and/or 5.1 on your desktop - PART #2

Sometime back I posted on how to dual boot android with other operating systems, the instructions mainly were for Ubuntu, these instructions are for those who do not want to play around with the menu.lst or 40_custom. The other day while trying to install Android-x86 and modifying the 40_custom, with bad results I accidently found a workaround and would like to share it.

First off you are still going to need to download something, if one is not available, a partitioning program, Ubuntu Live CD has this option.

Once you have either burned to a CD, or dd Ubuntu to a USB stick, boot your computer, make sure the proper settings in BIOS to boot from CD or USB are enabled, to the run Ubuntu Live.

Now open up your terminal. and in terminal enter:

sudo gparted

From there you are going to create a partition. Right now I am running 4.4, still testing partition schemes and will update, apps seem to keep freezing so am going to see if this has to do something with they type of partition. Just a note, if planning on running Android 5.1, ext4 is the best option, found that in 5.1 apps would not install on ext2 or ext3.

Now that the partition is setup, this is what I did accidently, reboot your PC, remove the Ubuntu Live and insert the Android CD or USB. In Bios, according to the settings of your PC, set to boot from a USB stick. Boot the Android-x86 install, install to the partition, skip the installation of GRUB. When completed, reboot, keep the Android-x86 CD/USB inserted and have a blank USB stick inserted as well. Now install Android-x86 to the USB and say yes to Grub and Grub EFI if asked.

Once that install is done, remove the Android-x86 installation CD/USB, but, keep the one that you installed Android-x86 on inserted in the PC. Now when you start your PC, Android will boot, if you pay attention, you will see a message saying, found android on /dev/sdaX. When done using Android, remove the Android stick and the main OS will boot.

**UPDATE**

After testing on various partions, so far ext4, so far, gives the best proformance when running apps. Have not tried the NTFS or VFAT yet. Because the install does not give the option for ext4, you must manually format the drive/partition to ext4 in gparted.